It also had electric monks:

>The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe.

I've always preferred Dirk Gently to Hitchhiker's, likely because it speaks to me more personally as a programmer.

    > "What I mean is that if you really want to understand something, the best way is
    > to try and explain it to someone else. That forces you to sort it out in your own
    > mind ... By the time you've sorted out a complicated idea into little steps that
    > even a stupid machine can deal with, you've certainly learned something about
    > it yourself. The teacher usually learns more than the pupil. Isn't that true?"
    > "It would be hard to learn much less than my pupils," came a low growl from somewhere
    > on the table, "without undergoing a prefrontal lobotomy."

Adams was clearly inspired by his time working on the computer game. All of his books have an autobiographical sense to them. Hitchhiker's and Restaurant had a lot of lying in muddy fields. The books written after he was published include more eating in fancy Greek bistros.

I think in the forward to my copy of the series he tells a story about lying in a muddy field stargazing when he comes up with the idea for the hitchhiker's guide and promptly dozing off and forgetting about it for the next 10 years.

And now we don't even need to record anything. Just putting an important documentary in my Netflix watch list immediately makes me a more accomplished person ;)

Surely a VCR, not a camcorder.

Perhaps he meant DVR. My MythTV DVR setup records stuff I think I want to watch, then a few weeks later, it deletes most of the shows to make space for more stuff I may never watch.

Yes, I always wanted the spreadsheet called Anthem, that could make pretty charts sing. It seems charting is spreadsheets is getting worse and worse instead.